


The Sheikah Exchange

by TheDoctorIsIcecube



Series: Sheikah Link [1]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Foreign Language, Gay Link, M/M, Sheikah Link, foreign exchange
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 22:31:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5266232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDoctorIsIcecube/pseuds/TheDoctorIsIcecube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zelda signed up for the exchange in an instant, but she didn't exactly ask for a MALE exchange partner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sheikah Exchange

When Zelda heard about the exchange program, she was the first to sign up. Actual Sheikah were a rare sight in Hyrule, and apparently the exchange was aiming to boost relations.

As well as teaching them the language, but she was more interested in the culture aspect of the trip.

The Sheikah were such an interesting people, with different values and beliefs to Hylians. Whoever her exchange partner was, Zelda was sure she would spend a lot of time talking about culture.

And the language. The language was fascinating, too.

The teacher in charge of the exchange started handing round letters with little photos attached, one for every person who had signed up for the exchange. Zelda hoped the person she was matched with was nice.

She got her photo, and it was a boy. She put her hand up. "Miss?"

"Yes, Zelda?"

"Did you give me the wrong letter? This is a boy and I thought we were supposed to be matched with people of the same gender."

"There weren't enough girls, sorry Zelda." She said.

"Okay, then." She studied the photo in front of her. The boy didn't look entirely Sheikah, and he even had one blue eye and one red one.

He was blonde and his skin was fairly light for a Sheikah. He was smiling in the photo. His form was all filled out in Sheikah.

Zelda knew the basics of the language. His name was Link, he was sixteen, same as her, and he was apparently one-quarter Hylian.

He said he could read and write Hylian fluently, but speaking was more of a challenge for him because he never really heard it. At least, that was what she thought he was saying.

Their homework for the week was to write and send a letter back to their Sheikah exchange partners, and from then on to keep up regular contact with them. They were supposed to write in Hylian, to give the Sheikah some practise with the language.

The boy would have gotten her form, too. He'd be wondering why he got a girl.

Zelda hoped he wasn't going to try and flirt with her or anything. Just because he had to live in her house for two weeks did not mean she was going to stand for flirting.  
She'd have to go back to him for two weeks as well. To a Sheikah country.

It was kind of exciting if she was honest. Incredibly scary, the thought of being in a foreign country away from her father for two weeks, but exciting nevertheless.

A Sheikah country. It was going to be great. She just wished it wasn't a boy who she had to do it all with.  
Zelda went home and wrote him a letter, including near the end a not-so-subtle jab about not trying any flirting with her. She tried to be nice, but nice didn't always work with boys.

She didn't mention it to her father, because he would kick up a fuss with the school, and she was fine with a boy as long as he was nice.

She'd tell her father a couple of days before the trip, when it was too late to cancel anything or find her a new partner. He'd probably be fine with it.

Three days later, she got a message back from the boy. It was written entirely in very, very good Hylian.

He seemed very polite, and he'd included another photo. This one had clearly been taken on his phone, and he looked a lot more Sheikah. Two red eyes, slightly darker hair, and there was some kind of filter on the picture to make his skin a little darker. Clearly he wasn't proud of his Hylian ancestry. Also included in the letter was an equally not-so-subtle jab back at her, saying that he had a boyfriend and didn't plan on leaving him for a Hylian girl.  
Well. He didn't seem very pleasant. But at least he wouldn't be flirting with her.

He had also included an email address in the letter, so Zelda typed out her next letter and sent it electronically. No more exorbitant postage costs for her.

She started discussing her likes and dislikes with the boy, hoping that he'd get past the fact that he was Hylian.

The next email from him arrived a day later, and he seemed very excited that she liked reading. Apparently he was also an avid reader, and a writer, too. He offered to send her some of his work, if she felt like reading it.  
She was surprised he wrote in Hylian. He seemed incredibly hesitant to even mention anything to do with Hylians.

Over the next few weeks, they emailed back and forth almost daily. Zelda found herself starting to like Link, despite her initial impressions. He was a decent writer, as well.

Link also rambled on about his boyfriend for a good three emails. Zelda wasn't sure if she knew more about him or his boyfriend by now.

The boyfriend in question was a Sheikah living in Hyrule who went by the name of Sheik. Zelda wisely did not comment on the rather obvious name.

Link talked at length about his appearance and interests and how sweet he was and funny things he'd done and what he said Hyrule was like.

He also talked at fair length about himself and his family. His father's father was Hylian and also dead, and Link wore a red contact lens and dyed his hair to fit in with the other Sheikah.

That was the most he said about the topic though, he wouldn't say why he did that. She wondered if relationships of the two species where frowned upon.  
She could ask him in person, perhaps. It was harder to avoid question when asked face to face. And it wasn't long until the exchange now, only a week.

They were coming here first. They'd be here, they'd see some sights for a week and then they'd go to school for a week.

Three days before the trip, Zelda admitted to her father that her exchange partner was a boy. He wasn't best pleased, but he grudgingly accepted it and decided that Link could have the spare room that was furthest away from Zelda.

She didn't tell her father that her exchange partner had a boyfriend, because he'd accept that even less.

On the day the exchange students were due to arrive, Zelda had the day off school to greet them. They landed in Hyrule early in the morning, and by twelve, they were ready to be picked up from the airport.

There were a group of thirty students all standing there. They were...acting like normal teenagers. They dressed like normal Hylian teenagers.

There was one boy sitting on the end who was hiding most of his face behind a scarf, and wearing a green woollen beanie on his head to cover his hair. Yes, it was November, but that kind of dress was a little excessive.  
She recognised him as Link immediately, though. Because he was sitting on his suitcase reading a book.

The students were let go one by one, and Zelda greeted Link with a smile and a wave. He was shorter than she'd expected. All the Sheikah were, in fact. And he was as skinny as a bundle of sticks.

"Hi Link." She smiled at him, and he grinned back, putting his book away in a rucksack.

"Hi. How are you?" He had a thick Sheikah accent, and Zelda immediately decided she liked the sound of it. Link got up to hug her quickly, and then followed her back to her father's car as they chatted.

His Sheikah accent was incredibly thick. She tried to get him to say her name but it sounded a little more like Silda than anything like her name.

They arrived at home and Zelda showed Link to his room, helping him to unpack his stuff. He would be spending the rest of the day settling in here, and Zelda was supposed to educate him about Hylian culture.

The thing was, she knew nothing about Sheikah culture, so she didn't know what he already knew.

Instead of culture, she talked to Link about books. That had always been their fallback conversation when they were emailing, and they both seemed to have endless things to say about the subject.

She then discovered that sometimes Link's accent was horrendous and she couldn't understand a word he was saying. Did they even teach Hylian pronunciation?

"I think you can't understand sometimes me," he said after a while, and then frowned. "That was the wrong way round. In Sheikah, words go in a different order." The way he said Sheikah was very different to how she said it, but it was probably the right way.

"I can help you with pronunciations," she offered. "Didn't you say you wanted to live here when you were older? If you managed to learn a Hylian accent, it would make it easier for you."

"Is it that bad? My dad says it needs work."

"It definitely needs work." Zelda laughed. "I can't understand you when you get excited."

Link laughed. "It doesn't matter when I speak Sheikah."

"What does Sheikah sound like?" She asked. She hadn't heard the language spoken by a native for years.

Link smiled and immediately started speaking. She could catch a few words, but it was so much faster than the listening exercises at school.

It was a beautiful language, strangely both flowing and sharp. Zelda wished she could one day be able to speak it like that.

"It sounds really nice when you speak it." She smiled.

"You sound nice when you speak Hylian."

"Thank you." She switched to the Sheikah language. "My Sheikah isn't very good. It's, um, it's much worse than yours? Did I get that right?" The last sentence was spoken in Hylian again.

He nodded. "Your Sheikah isn't that bad."

"Not as good as your Hylian." Link couldn't really disagree with that, so he just shrugged and the conversation turned back to what they'd both been reading lately.

This was so much easier than talking about culture. Talking to Link was awkward when it wasn't about something they understood.

They spoke for the rest of the day until dinner, where Zelda's father seemed to have made it his mission to cook the most traditionally Hylian foods he could.

There was lots and lots of meat, which got very awkward when Zelda had to inform her father that Sheikah usually didn't eat meat.

Link ate some of it, although Zelda thought it was mostly out of politeness. He said that he occasionally ate meat at home, because of his partially Hylian descent.

She could tell he never really ate meat, though, because he kept prodding at it with his fork and his face when her father had showed up with the plate was pale.

After the meal, she took him aside and apologised, and then she went to her father and asked if it was possible to not cook any meat for two weeks.

He frowned, but said it was okay, and they'd find some alternatives. She'd thought her father would have been nicer about Link, really.

After the meal was over, Zelda didn't see much of Link. He said he had stuff to do and shut himself in his room, leaving Zelda to sit and wonder what he was doing.

She hoped he was okay. He had been forced to eat meat.

The next morning, she asked him what he had been doing. Apparently he had been in a video call with Sheik all evening, and he felt much better now.

She hadn't known he'd been feeling that bad, but she didn't know how much of a bad thing eating meat was for Sheikah.

Over the next week, Zelda only really saw Link in the evenings. The Sheikah students were being taken around the whole of Hyrule to see the sights, and every evening Link would come back with new stories. There were things she hadn't seen, like they'd been given a tour of the public areas of the castle.

Of course, the castle no longer held the Hylian royal family. It was a place of government instead, since the monarchy had been abandoned well over two hundred years ago now.

Her father worked with the government. He said that the government system was inefficient and the parties didn't really stand for what they said they did.

Zelda wanted to become a politician and change that when she was older. She told Link all of this one evening, explaining what she would do with the country if she ever managed to lead the government.

Link then attempted to explain the system of government in the Sheikah country he was from. He said there were communities which each had a head and they decided things, but it was also more complicated than that.

Zelda gave up trying to understand Sheikah politics by the time it reached about ten at night. She was glad that at least it was simple in Hyrule.

Then Link introduced her to Sheik over a Skype call. Sheik's Hylian accent was incredible, but he did live in Hyrule.

Sheik was fully Sheikah, that much was obvious. He was even wearing a stone pendant with the Sheikah eye carved into it. He seemed nice enough, and he was clearly very protective of Link.

She was curious about how old he was, because he was clearly a little older than Link. He looked it and seemed it.  
He was a year older, according to Link, and he'd moved to Hyrule when he was young. They'd been together a long time, now.

When they were done with the call, Link explained that when Sheikah turned sixteen they could do a ceremony and they were considered fully Sheikah, but he was worried that he wouldn't be allowed to do it.

He was already sixteen, and it was a month until all of the new sixteen year olds in his community could do the ceremony, he said. Zelda told him he would be allowed to do it, because it would be stupid if he wasn't.

Link smiled at her brightly when she said that. It was sweet he was so committed to his culture. She couldn't really care less about Hylian values or whatever.

The next week, Link was at her school. He was sat with her in every lesson, and he seemed to find Hylian school very interesting.

He'd changed from wearing his normal clothes to wearing something that she'd seen Sheikah people wear before, except it was a lot more modern than a cloak.

During the week Link was at her school, Zelda devoted all of her free time to helping him perfect his Hylian accent. By Friday, he could almost pass for a native.

It was very impressive how quickly he learned. In fact, almost all the Sheikah seemed to be smarter than the Hylians.

Link had one last weekend in Hyrule, and Zelda realised she was really going to miss him. He was definitely someone to stay in contact with.

He was very sweet, and nice all the time. He was interesting and he could make her laugh, once she understood his jokes.

He was a good friend, and Zelda hoped she would get to see him again soon. They spent Sunday afternoon sitting and reading together, before Link's flight left that evening.

She couldn't wait to go to the Sheikah country. It would be so interesting learning more about Sheikah in their homes! She seemed to be the only person in her class who was excited, though.

Oh well. She'd made a new friend, even if all of then hadn't. And she didn't intend to lose her new friend any time soon.

They'd said that their Sheikah exchanges had refused to eat meat and hardly spoke any Hylian, even though their Sheikah was just as atrocious.

Zelda thought they were being pretty unfair, really. She couldn't wait to visit the Sheikah in a few months' time.  
All the other people on the exchange said they were worried about rabies and diseases that they could get off dirty floors.

According to Link, the Sheikah lands weren't dirty at all. They were even cleaner than Hyrule, he thought.  
He said that he cleaned their whole house every day, and even though it was a lot smaller than Zelda's, there was still enough room for him and his parents.

It was going to be great to visit Link, she decided. No matter what everyone else said.


End file.
